He stood in the second room, jaw muscles working. The mentality’s displayed image had not changed noticeably in all the time he had studied it. Placid, undisturbed, timeless; soon to be reborn, and perhaps to attempt its higher purpose yet again…

Olmy had never put himself into a situation where his inner being could be violated. He had even shied away from mixing personalities with lovers and friends, not uncommon back in the heady days of the Jart Wars. Whenever he had joined entertainments in city memory, he had always carefully wrapped a tight shell around his self.

He regarded this foible with as much amusement as anyone; but he had violated the rule only once, when he had downloaded Korzenowski’s reassembled partials into his implant memories. Korzenowski’s scattered mentality had been close enough to share only his outer layer of thoughts, and nothing deeper, however.

In a way, he detested deep intimacy. He valued his singularness. He had never subscribed to the old poet’s maxim that to be alone was to be in bad company. Olmy clearly understood why he rejected deep intimacy; he did not want to know himself completely, or to have anybody else know him. He did not relish the thought of exploring his own mentality, as others did.

But to know the Jart, the best way would be to download it into an isolated implant within himself. He could not trust any device to resist the Jart’s explorations; inside, he could constantly monitor the downloaded mentality, and even shift it from an implant using one system to another with a different system. He had three large memory implants, one of them only five decades old, the extra two installed in anticipation of carrying the Engineer’s partials, all of Talsit construction. Each could be modified at will, isolated, examined from outside with little or no chance of unwanted output from whatever was kept in memory…

The plan had been inevitable all along.

Olmy had simply avoided the obvious.

How much was he willing to sacrifice for the Terrestrial Hexamon? His mentality, his soul? If the Jart somehow managed to corrode its way through all internal barriers, to outwit and outmaneuver him, then more than that would be lost.

The Jart had allowed itself to be captured.

It was a Trojan Horse.

Of this much he was sure.

And he was about to take the horse within the walls of his own precious citadel, his mind.

If his safeguards failed, the Jart might do what it had probably planned to do all along. It could become a spy, a saboteur in human form, within the Hexamon. It could control all of his memories, even, in the worse case imaginable, convince his enslaved personality that he was acting of his own volition.

Hormonal implants kept his body chemistry in relative balance, but the sharp bite of fear was still apparent. Olmy had never been so unsure of the outcome of his plans.